The article presents a reinterpretation of the welfare state dealing with the role played by women in the development and on-going function of the welfare state. Three roles are emphasized: women's organizing and the role of women's organizations in pressuring for the measures making up the welfare state, women as workers in the welfare state and, finally, women as clients of the welfare state. Having described these roles, the current politics of the welfare state are examined in order to illustrate the importance of understanding the relations between gender and politics.

Ontario's two minority governments provide political scientists an opportunity to analyze how a government and legislature will function when executive control is curtailed by the electorate. It also affords an opportunity to observe the dynamics of legislative reform in a situation where backbenchers have unaccustomed clout. Relying on a survey of “insider” opinion, the article finds that MPPs showed little interest in reforms other than those which improved their services. Further, it finds that all the normal functions attributed to the legislature were performed better in a minority situation. However, while the majority of respondents had positive overall assessments of the minority experience, they had a variety of reservations about perpetuating it in some way. The article points up the dilemma that there appears to be no way to “capture” the widely recognized positive aspects of minority administrations within the norms of parliamentary government accepted by legislators and no willingness on their part to vary these norms.

This article contends that the ethical principle underlying C. B. Macpherson's attempted retrieval of liberal democracy embodies two ontologies, a liberal ontology of self-governance and a humanist ontology of developmental man. The presence of the latter ontology is shown to reveal a fundamental weakness in Macpherson's thought: it justifies a type of political authority destructive of what he values in liberal democracies. The article concludes that, contrary to Macpherson's understanding, his radical effort to rescue liberal democracy from capitalism could dispense with the humanist ontology and be sustained on the basis of the liberal ontology alone.

Rousseau had usually been interpreted as desiring the re-emergence of pre-modern virtue. His writings contain many appeals to this supreme virtue of courage and honour. At the same time, however, Rousseau embraces many of the principles of modern philosophical thought, thus rendering a return to classical virtue problematic. The author proposes that his commitment to modern principles entails a substantial reformulation of virtue such that it becomes expressed as those qualities displayed in the social world of labour and love. This new account alters the character of human association by fundamentally altering the ancient distinction between public and private. The new social sphere which develops through this alteration is, however, subject to some difficulties.

Students of urban politics have in the past tended to neglect the question of gender in their research. Since the early 1970s, however, this question has generated a significant number of studies. Investigation of the role of women in cities, in relation to the various components of urban structure such as transportation and housing, shows that women have a variety of relations with the organization of social space. The results of research to date allow us to define the main aspects of these relationships, and to assess the relevance of these kinds of enquiries. Several trends can be discerned in the literature in this emerging field. These indicate that the strengths and the weaknesses of future research will be at two levels: that of theory-building in the area of gender politics, and that of continuing investigations of this question in the context of more traditional approaches to urban politics.

In the discourse of Canadian political science, the term “province-building” has gained wide currency. Although not often defined explicitly, it denotes the recent evolution of more powerful and competent provincial administrations which aim to manage socioeconomic change in their territories and which are in essential conflict with the central government. In this analysis, the generalizations which constitute province-building are examined and most are found not to be adequately supported by the evidence now available. Some lines of research are indicated and it is suggested that this emotive and misleading concept be abandoned.